The game hasn't begun, but deck is being shuffled
To lawmakers who'd almost rather be waterboarded than be on record voting for any revenue measure with the word "tax" attached to it, the neon dollar signs around legal gambling are a fantasy of free money.
It's not free, of course, to the gamblers (recreational and otherwise) who make it profitable. The world's most famous desert resort didn't get the rueful nickname "Lost Wages" because visitors all come away from Caesar's Palace with pockets full of cash; and all those lavish, glittery pleasure palaces in Vegas and Reno and Biloxi weren't built to lose money.
Big-time gambling interests have had their sights on Georgia for a long time. And the political and financial powers that be in Georgia are starting to pay serious attention.
Months before the start of the 2016 session of the General Assembly, a legislative committee has met three times to listen to pro and con arguments about casino gambling in the state, starting with Atlanta. As has been reported already, lawmakers are being aggressively courted by major casino companies, most prominent among them MGM. (Remember when MGM was a movie studio?) Chairman and CEO Jim Murren threw out the intoxicating figure of $1 billion as the size of a project Atlanta could support, with all the lucrative dining and entertainment "accessories" associated with such large-scale projects.
This courtship is serious: According to the Savannah Morning News, MGM alone has 14 registered lobbyists in Georgia. (To put that in a meaningful context, Georgia Power Co. has 15.) That doesn't include lobbyists for Boyd Gaming Corp., which operates Mississippi and Louisiana casinos, or Penn National Gaming, which also operates Mississippi sites.
Like their counterparts in Alabama, some Georgia lawmakers have been coveting the bucks flowing to Indian casinos in neighboring states -- Cherokees in North Carolina, Seminoles in Florida, Poarch Creeks in Alabama -- casinos that answer only to federal, rather than state authority.
Other gambling proponents, in "Preservation of the HOPE Scholarship Program" study committee meetings, have pointed to recent squeezes on lottery funds as a reason to supplement that money with another source of gambling revenue.
Opponents, including the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition, argue that corruption and compulsive gambling would be inevitable consequences. One of the coalition's spokespersons, Virginia Galloway, also argues -- quite legitimately -- that innocuously named committees make it likely that people "don't know by the name what it's about."
Indeed, it behooves Georgians to stay on top of where this issue stands and where it's headed.
Perhaps appropriately, one of the suggested locations for an Atlanta casino is the current site of Turner Field. Anybody who thinks enabling legislation for casino gambling couldn't be slipped in under the radar should remember how an entire major league franchise got smuggled out of town in almost total political secrecy.
This story was originally published December 14, 2015 at 5:25 PM with the headline "The game hasn't begun, but deck is being shuffled."